SOURCE: MacPherson, Hugh. “The Songs of War.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5064 (21 April 2000): 21.

In the following review, MacPherson praises Three Elegies for Kosovo as a lucid and insightful exploration into Kosovar politics and history.

Three Elegies for Kosovo again creates the eerie world that was the setting for Ismail Kadare's novel The Three-Arched Bridge, a medieval equivalent of the 1930s, in which war between power blocs is inevitable, and in which the final period before conflict is made even more tense by rumour and propaganda. The stories that circulate claim to report the very words used by European kings, the Byzantine Emperor and the Turkish Sultan (whose recent assumption of that title is seen as ominous).

Among those assembling for the campaign are the minstrels for the allied forces gathered against the Turkish advance. In the phoney war that precedes real action, the Albanian and Serbian minstrels sing their...